Hitlist

A member of the Fountain Pen Network, ctf, has designed and produced his own notebook, the Hitlist, and I was one of the lucky FPNers to get a sample of it. Ctf will be selling the Hitlist through FPN. It's made with fountain pens in mind to minimize feathering and bleed through, and I love it.

As you can see in the pic, it's small, not much larger than a 3x5 index card. It's actually 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 with 32 pages (16 sheets). The paper is thick and smooth, so it feels great to the touch. The Hitlist also has white paper so that it won't affect the color of inks. I had no problems at all with feathering, bleed through or show through, and writing on the paper was about as smooth an experience as writing on Clairefontaine paper, but the dry time was slightly faster in the Hitlist, although that's not saying much. I wouldn't want to use a really wet writer in this notebook.

It also has a notch in the front cover to hold a pen in place when it's clipped to the notebook. It's really designed for carrying around in a pocket, but for people like me who put notebooks in bags rather than pockets, the notch wouldn't be much use because the pen would just get caught on everything in the bag. Still, it shows that ctf was thinking about how people use pens and how to make the Hitlist useful and convenient.

One feature that I find useful and clever is the label strip along the front of the spine. Someone who used these frequently could set them spine upwards in an index box and find the right notebook pretty quickly. I know that I'm always digging through old notebooks trying to find x or y that I know I wrote down but can't remember where.

Oh, and the logo is cute, and the idea of carrying around my own personal hitlist amuses me.